I collected 57 published accounts of filmmakers opening their books on marketing and release spend, from a $1,000 theatrical ...

I followed the careers of 1,765 directors of top grossing films to work out who gets another go after a first film that doesn ...

My latest Film Data Scientist video, this time looking at the numbers behind the age of directors. If you would like a slightly more… ahem… sensible reading of ...

I studied the data behind 2,271 movies to reveal why Hollywood's big budget fare is often so poor. It's not random but the ...

Every year the Black List crowns Hollywood's best unmade screenplays. I traced two decades of scripts and 1,682 writers to see if the list a brilliant talent-spotter, a genuine career-maker, or both.

“We’re moments away from uploading a script and making movies!” (This is usually followed by the person trying to get me to look at a demo of their “ground-breaking” vibe-coded AI-to-storyboard ...

I have received a few questions from readers about the path to becoming a top movie director, prompted by a recent Substack post entitled “The Annenberg Ouroboros” by Hollywood Gadfly. The chart below ...

Erwin M. Schmidt reached out to point me to a new study of the survival rates of on-screen geologists in movies titled “Geologists on the silver screen—the sequel”. Four geologists at the University ...

This month, we’ve seen the stellar performance of Obsession (currently $147 million at the worldwide box office - almost 80 times its budget), which has led readers to get in touch to ask if this ...